CLEVELAND — Hey Cleveland, another one of those internet lists that rank U.S. cities for various things just came out and we got mentioned! Based on precedent, do you think it went well?
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As Clevelanders, by this point, whenever we see one of these clickbait ranking lists meant to capture our attention by manipulatively invoking our pride and insecurities, we should obviously just scroll past without engaging, because it’s not going to be an accurate reflection of what we really….and oooops, I’m weak, bored and curious and I already clicked on it!
And according to the website WalletHub.com, Cleveland ranked number 181 on the list of the happiest cities in America. Which sounds bad already, but gets even worse, because that’s out of 182 cities, with only Cleveland’s precious ego-savior Detroit bringing up the rear. Oh, just go ahead and use it.
But wait, it’s worse. When they conducted this same study last year, we ranked 179, so we’ve actually fallen two spots. Which means the two cities that we were beating, Huntington, West Virginia and Shreveport, Louisiana either got a little happier last year or we got a little sadder. Either way, not good for us, but, hey… (Still not Detroit!).
Of course, that’s far from the only list we’ve found ourselves over the past year. And thank gosh we have them! Otherwise, how would we have known that we’re also the country’s third neediest city with the 4th worst case of Asthma, and that we also apparently have a Third-World Country-esque airport. All useful info.
Even our positive rankings are usually not much to brag about. For example, it’s not that we’re not deeply honored that the website CleverRealEstate.com ranked Cleveland the “Third-most affordable Pizza City in America, that’s great. It’s just a pretty weak brag to try and focus any kind of vigorous tourism campaign around.
Of course, the city ranking lists are the wicked spawn of a countless number of websites, but one name does seem to surface more than others: WalletHub.com. It’s a website that we often mention here when these lists come out, but what exactly is WalletHub? And why do they seem to have it in for us? I felt it was time to ask. WalletHub editor Christie Matherne was kind enough to explain a bit more about their business model and methodology.
"WalletHub was founded in 2013, and it started as a credit card comparison website, and it kind of evolved into a bigger personal finance platform," she explained. We also have a huge wing now putting out these studies of all kinds of different economic and otherwise indicators."
So does WalletHub have some sort of vendetta against Cleveland? Christie says it really just comes down to numbers.
"I can say that a lot of these studies...we incorporated things like poverty rates, unemployment rates...share of households earning annual incomes above $75,000, which is a happiness threshold, so those are things Cleveland did particularly bad with," she said. "[But that said,] I wish the best for Cleveland. We don't have anything against you guys."
So even though WalletHub is honing in on purely economic factors and completely disregarding the joy of Northeast Ohio's Fish Fry season, I will give kudos to WalletHub and Christie for chatting with me.
In being good sports, I believe that most people are savvy enough to simply enjoy these city lists as the conversation starters that they are and not take them too seriously. But I like to take it a step further by ignoring all the bad lists and only focusing on the good ones. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take advantage of living the third-most affordable pizza city in the US of A.